Although Adam McKay’s previous offering, Vice, managed to rack up an impressive eight Oscar nominations, including one win, it didn’t exactly go down as much of a fan favourite – unlike his earlier films, including Anchorman and Step Brothers, that have developed quite a cult following – although personally I really enjoyed it, it even made its way into my top ten films of 2019. So ending the year with political satire, Don’t Look Up seemed like a pretty good idea, but the question is would McKay deliver the goods once again?

Now, we would like to think that if – or I should really say, when – an extinction level event is just over the horizon our media platforms would inform and educate us ‘common people’, and the global leaders, and tech giants would do everything in their power to prevent our impending demise but let’s be honest, we know preserving life is not the goal – money, power and influence is the goal. This rather unfortunate home truth permeates McKay’s hilariously depressing satire which holds a mirror up to modern life in much the same way as Charlie Brooker’s anthology series Black Mirror does for our reliance and abuse of technology. 

In amongst the overtly cheery breakfast show hosts, eccentric tech billionaires and the latest celebrity break-up, the main crux of the story follows PHD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her mentor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), as they try to warn the world of an approaching comet, bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs, that is sure to wipe out all life on Earth in just six short months. 

Although their discovery (eventually) grants them an audience with the President of the United States – a thoroughly unpleasant, chain-smoking Trump-esque figure – the command is to “sit and assess” until their findings are verified, and more importantly, the upcoming mid-terms are over. Not happy with the cold shoulder they got from the Oval Office, Kate and Randall decide to take the message to the people themselves, garnering a segment on the popular breakfast chat show ‘The Daily Rip’ but end-of-the-world doomsday negativity and desperate pleas for people to just simply look up doesn’t fit with the upbeat, banter-filled tone of the show. And it is here that McKay’s social commentary really steps it up a notch.  

Despite being a sweaty bag of nerves and incoherent sentences, Dr. Randall is dubbed an A.I.L.F (astronomer I’d like to f**k) by the public and finds himself on a journey to success, popularity and prestige whereas when Kate’s barely-holding-it-together terror bubbles to the surface, her hysterical f**k-filled explosion on national television becomes a meme within a matter of milliseconds and her integrity goes out of the window. 

And as the battle between those in the #LookUp and #DontLookUp camps rages on, Earth’s impending doom moves ever closer. 

Jennifer Lawrence delivers a ‘Katniss Everdeen meets Lisbeth Salander’ performance that is believable and relatable, yet also seems to play up to her rather lukewarm inclusion within the Hollywood elite. Perhaps the ‘get with the game, or else’ vibe is another element of social commentary from the directors part. Alongside Lawrence, DiCaprio does as DiCaprio does, delivering a solid and dependable performance that feels both different and yet exactly the same to most of his other roles. Although here I may be letting my personal bias’ get in the way of an objective view.

The star power doesn’t just stop with Lawrence and DiCaprio; Meryl Streep seems to relish her turn as Trump-esque President Orleans as much as her character relishes a cigarette, Tyler Perry and a disturbingly plastic looking Cate Blanchett add to the fun and frolics as the superficial and phony breakfast show hosts and Timothee Chalamet delivers the pretentious millennial role with zeal. But it is the inspired brilliance of Mark Rylance as the softly spoken, coldly mechanical billionaire business mogul Peter Isherwell and the improv talents of Jonah Hill as the bratty, entitled Chief of Staff that steal the show.

Humour-wise it jumps between the subtle and the bizarre, thematically it ranges from the shrewd and complex to the on-the-nose and in-your-face and emotionally it is both stinging indictment on human nature and a demand – no, plea – to for us to take a step back and think for a moment. Considering the amount that McKay has managed to pack into the 140 minute runtime it’s not surprising that Don’t Look Up has, rather ironically, been dividing opinion amongst viewers critics alike. 

The complexity of the story is difficult to manage and does falter at times but overall McKay delivers something solid and enjoyable; a depressingly funny, hilariously depressing, bitingly cynical representation of the human race.

Don’t Look Up is available to stream on Netflix.